![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I admit I sort of put this one off, because I haven't been in the mood to dwell in a regretful headspace lately. So I think I will honor that and pick something sort of easy, rather than delving deep. :)
I regret not applying to more and better colleges, back when I did my applying. I made the practical choice - a state school with a graduate program in library science. I picked the one I liked best and that I felt would serve me best, but I wish I had been less practical and aimed higher for my undergrad education, and then took grad school as a separate thing (I was happy with my grad school choice, so it's just those two years of away-from-home undergrad that I would have done differently.)
URI did not challenge me enough as an undergrad. I took classes with people who just did not care. I was lonely because I was a married undergrad with no money and little interest in intense drinking - weird in every possible way! People at URI had money, they had no responsibilities, and they spent most of their nights at the bars. I skated through classes, getting A's for simply writing decently. I learned, but I wished for a richer college experience with more friends, work that was more challenge and less drudgery, and less dumbing down to meet the needs of the spoiled disinterested masses.
Things got better in my last year of my undergrad program. That happened because a professor I loved led me towards the honors program. WHY NO ONE DID THIS BEFORE THIS POINT, I DO NOT KNOW. The honors program was perfect for me, because the classes were more varied, more difficult, more interesting, and populated with people who actually chose to be there. It was in the honors program that I took a history class on the Holocaust (thus vastly expanding my understanding of European history and politics, as well as giving me the experience of taking this class from a Polish Jew who survived, a very big deal in and of itself), a weird but fascinating class on ecology and literature (we visited a compost farm!), and various women's studies seminars that seriously shaped me as a person. My final project was on sex education and the internet, basically, which should come as no surprise. :)
In my head, Brown would have offered me a similar experience all the time, for example. But I don't know if I would really have been happier there. So actually, maybe my real regret is not finding the honors program right at the start of my time at URI.
I think everything else I can possibly say about regret approaches Clichéville, because I really do feel badly about times I have caused pain or things I wish I had done differently, but also feel like I learned something from most of those times and am better for it in the end. So there, I have officially entered Clichéville, population me, and you can all leave now. ;)
I regret not applying to more and better colleges, back when I did my applying. I made the practical choice - a state school with a graduate program in library science. I picked the one I liked best and that I felt would serve me best, but I wish I had been less practical and aimed higher for my undergrad education, and then took grad school as a separate thing (I was happy with my grad school choice, so it's just those two years of away-from-home undergrad that I would have done differently.)
URI did not challenge me enough as an undergrad. I took classes with people who just did not care. I was lonely because I was a married undergrad with no money and little interest in intense drinking - weird in every possible way! People at URI had money, they had no responsibilities, and they spent most of their nights at the bars. I skated through classes, getting A's for simply writing decently. I learned, but I wished for a richer college experience with more friends, work that was more challenge and less drudgery, and less dumbing down to meet the needs of the spoiled disinterested masses.
Things got better in my last year of my undergrad program. That happened because a professor I loved led me towards the honors program. WHY NO ONE DID THIS BEFORE THIS POINT, I DO NOT KNOW. The honors program was perfect for me, because the classes were more varied, more difficult, more interesting, and populated with people who actually chose to be there. It was in the honors program that I took a history class on the Holocaust (thus vastly expanding my understanding of European history and politics, as well as giving me the experience of taking this class from a Polish Jew who survived, a very big deal in and of itself), a weird but fascinating class on ecology and literature (we visited a compost farm!), and various women's studies seminars that seriously shaped me as a person. My final project was on sex education and the internet, basically, which should come as no surprise. :)
In my head, Brown would have offered me a similar experience all the time, for example. But I don't know if I would really have been happier there. So actually, maybe my real regret is not finding the honors program right at the start of my time at URI.
I think everything else I can possibly say about regret approaches Clichéville, because I really do feel badly about times I have caused pain or things I wish I had done differently, but also feel like I learned something from most of those times and am better for it in the end. So there, I have officially entered Clichéville, population me, and you can all leave now. ;)
